Thursday, 11 February 2010

Jaron Lanier: How the internet destroys creativity

Essentially, it's ruining our creative, it destroys creative industries and it turns us into spouters of wrong information with formulaic identities: the kind of thing we talk and think about when we say how all blogs look the same/there's nothing new out there/it's all self-promotion etc.

Essential reading in other words, and gathered together in Lanier's book I am not a Gadget: A Manifesto.

Lanier gives us his advice on how to heal the world wide web:

Heal the world wide web: Lanier's expert advice

* Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

* If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realise that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.

* Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

* Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.

* Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

* If you are Twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.